Strange Highways

them.
     Again she prayed that the telephone would work.
     Looking up at her, Tommy was bleak faced within the cowl of his coat. All but shouting against the cacophonous babble of the storm, she told him to wait there (as if he could do anything else), told him that she would be back in a minute (although they both knew that something terrible could happen to her in the house).
     Carrying the 12-gauge Mossberg, she went up the porch steps and cautiously opened the back door. The kitchen was a mess. Packages of food had been dragged out of the cabinets, torn open, and the contents scattered across the floor. Several kinds of cereal, sugar, flour, cornstarch, cornmeal, crackers, cookies, macaroni, and spaghetti were mixed with the shattered glass and wet contents of a score of broken jars of spaghetti sauce, applesauce, cherries, olives, and pickles.
     The destruction was unnerving because it was so unmistakably an expression of mindless rage. The rats had not torn these packages to obtain food. The creatures seemed so inimical to humankind that they destroyed people's property for the joy of it, reveling in the ruin and waste in much the way that gremlins of age-old myth were supposed to delight in the trouble that they caused.
     These monsters, of course, were man-made. What kind of world had it become when men created their own goblins? Or had that always been the case?
     She could see no signs of the rats that had caused the ruin in the kitchen, no furtive movement in the shadowy cupboards, no sinuous forms slinking along the walls or through the rubble. Cautiously she stepped across the threshold into the house.
     The icy wind came with her, exploding through the door, as if it were water under high pressure. White clouds of flour and sparkling miniature tornadoes of sugar granules were spun across the room, and some of the heavier debris - Cheerios and broken bits of spaghetti took flight as well.
     Garbage and shattered glass crunched underfoot as she edged warily to the telephone, which hung on the wall on the far side of the room, near the refrigerator.
     Three times she saw movement from the corner of her eye and was sure it was purposeful - the rats - and she swung the muzzle of the shotgun to bear on it. But it was always just an empty raisin box or the torn wrapper from a package of cookies stirring in the invasive wind.
     She reached the phone and lifted the handset. No dial tone. The line was dead, either because of the storm or the rats.
     As Meg regretfully returned the handset to its cradle, the wind subsided. In the suddenly still air, she smelled fumes. Natural gas. No, not natural gas. Something else. More like ... gasoline.
     Heating oil.
     All her internal alarm bells began to clang.
     Now that cold wind was no longer sweeping through the room, Meg realized that the house reeked of heating-oil fumes, which must be rising from the basement where the lines between the big oil tank and the furnace had been breached. She had walked into a trap. These ratlike gremlins were so hostile, so demonic, that they were willing to destroy the house that provided them with shelter if, in leveling it, they could kill one human being.
She stepped away from the telephone, toward the door.
     Through the ventilation duct she heard the soft, hollow, echoey, familiar thump-click-whoosh of the electronic pilot light on the basement furnace: the sparking of an electric arc to ignite the heating coils.
     A fraction of a second later, before she could even take a second step, the house exploded.

    13

FOLLOWING THE BLOODHOUND AND DEPUTY HOCKNER, FOLLOWED IN turn by three of his own men, Ben Parnell reached the northern perimeter of the woods and saw the faint lights of the house at Cascade Farm, dimly visible through the heavily falling snow, perhaps two hundred yards away across a sloping field.
     "I knew it," he said. "That's where they've gone."
     He thought of the woman and the boy in the station wagon, and he was overcome by a powerful sense of responsibility for them that went beyond his duties at Biolomech. For two years he'd felt that he had failed his own child, Melissa, by not saving her from cancer, which was irrational, of course, because he was not a doctor and did not have the knowledge to cure her. But his profound feeling of failure couldn't be assuaged. He'd always